"Subsidies and grants throw off the natural market signals that are supposed to allow students to make informed decisions on the true value of a college degree. Increasing aid, and expanding subsidies only intensifies the problem which will lead us down a path of more college dropouts and a continuation of skyrocketing tuition"
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Kirk’s line is a classic ideological judo move: take a policy meant to expand opportunity and reframe it as the engine of chaos. By calling subsidies and grants “natural market signals” interference, he’s not just making an economic claim; he’s assigning morality to the market. “Natural” does a lot of work here. It implies that prices are honest, that tuition is a kind of truth serum, and that public help is a distortion rather than a corrective to decades of wage stagnation, state disinvestment, and credential inflation.
The specific intent is to shift blame for “skyrocketing tuition” away from universities, state legislatures, and the broader political economy and toward the student aid state itself. The subtext: students are being tricked into college by artificially cheap money, and institutions respond by raising prices because someone else is paying. That’s the “Bennett hypothesis” dressed up for a post-2010 audience that’s furious about debt and skeptical of elite institutions.
Notice the rhetorical fuse: “supposed to allow students to make informed decisions” casts the market as a neutral guidance counselor, while “lead us down a path” forecasts social decay without naming who benefits from limiting aid. The dropout warning is a strategic emotional lever: it converts an equity argument (more people can enroll) into a fragility argument (more people will fail), implying that access itself is irresponsible.
Context matters. This lands in an era where college is simultaneously a cultural punching bag and a practical necessity, and where “aid makes it worse” offers a clean, blame-ready narrative that sidesteps harder fixes like reinvesting in public universities, regulating pricing, or strengthening labor markets so college isn’t the only viable on-ramp.
The specific intent is to shift blame for “skyrocketing tuition” away from universities, state legislatures, and the broader political economy and toward the student aid state itself. The subtext: students are being tricked into college by artificially cheap money, and institutions respond by raising prices because someone else is paying. That’s the “Bennett hypothesis” dressed up for a post-2010 audience that’s furious about debt and skeptical of elite institutions.
Notice the rhetorical fuse: “supposed to allow students to make informed decisions” casts the market as a neutral guidance counselor, while “lead us down a path” forecasts social decay without naming who benefits from limiting aid. The dropout warning is a strategic emotional lever: it converts an equity argument (more people can enroll) into a fragility argument (more people will fail), implying that access itself is irresponsible.
Context matters. This lands in an era where college is simultaneously a cultural punching bag and a practical necessity, and where “aid makes it worse” offers a clean, blame-ready narrative that sidesteps harder fixes like reinvesting in public universities, regulating pricing, or strengthening labor markets so college isn’t the only viable on-ramp.
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| Topic | Student |
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